SAfrica prosecutor: Congo rebels wanted coup, war

A supporter holds a Democratic Repupublic of Congo flag outside the court in Pretoria, South Africa, on Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013. Nineteen alleged members of a Congolese rebel group — including one U.S. citizen — sought help in their effort to overthrow Congolese President Joseph Kabila, offering mining rights in their resource-rich country in exchange for weapons and training, a prosecutor said Thursday. (AP Photo/Jon Gambrell)
— AP

A supporter holds a Democratic Repupublic of Congo flag outside the court in Pretoria, South Africa, on Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013. Nineteen alleged members of a Congolese rebel group — including one U.S. citizen — sought help in their effort to overthrow Congolese President Joseph Kabila, offering mining rights in their resource-rich country in exchange for weapons and training, a prosecutor said Thursday. (AP Photo/Jon Gambrell)
/ AP

PRETORIA, South Africa 
Nineteen alleged members of a Congolese rebel group - including one U.S. citizen - sought outside help in their effort to overthrow Congolese President Joseph Kabila, offering mining rights in their resource-rich country in exchange for weapons and training, a prosecutor said Thursday.

But those the 19 found in South Africa to help their cause were not mercenaries. They were undercover police officers.

Belonging to an organization called the Union of Nationalists for Renewal, the men sent an email "wish list" asking for machine guns, radios and even surface-to-air missiles and arranged for a training camp, prosecutor Shaun Abrahams told a magistrate judge at a court hearing in Pretoria, South Africa's capital.

The alleged conspirators remained under watch by officers for months but never made it to their training camp. The only weapons Abrahams said the group was offered came the night before the arrests, when undercover police officers coaxed the men to pose for photographs with Kalashnikov assault rifles and other high-powered weapons.

Abrahams said the plot - apparently led by a man who claims to be the eldest son of Congo's assassinated President Laurent Kabila - posed a serious danger to the stability of a nation long engulfed by conflict. The men wanted to "wage a full-scale war" in mineral-rich eastern Congo, Abrahams said. "The accused would take back the (Congo) by coup and conventional warfare."

Police arrested the men Tuesday as they were on their way to what they believed would be a paramilitary training camp in South Africa's northeast Limpopo province to prepare for their armed attack in Congo, Abrahams said. Their cover, the prosecutor said, was to pretend to be training as game rangers to fight the unchecked poaching of rhinoceros in South Africa.

The men first met the undercover officers of the South African Police Service in September, Abrahams said, after investigators received a tip the coup plotters wanted assistance in preparing for battle. The men met off and on for weeks with the officers at restaurants and a hotel, once showing a map with the locations of the Union of Nationalists for Renewal's some 9,000 rebels, the prosecutor said. An email sent later asked for thousands of machine guns and grenades, as well as missiles, cash, radios and satellite phones, he said.

The alleged rebels acknowledged they had no cash, but promised the undercover officers they'd get mining rights in the country's east as payment for their services, Abrahams said. Congo, sub-Saharan Africa's biggest country, is estimated to have mineral deposits worth trillions of dollars. However, it lacks roads and railways, as its feeble government and weak army remain unable to control much outside of its capital, Kinshasa.

Making deals on Congo's mineral resources in exchange for armed support to take power has been a pattern set by rebels for decades, including when Laurent Kabila came to power in the 1990s. Records of mineral deals still show the names of Zimbabwean generals who sent troops to fight alongside Kabila's then rebels against longtime dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.